Losing Scotty
Scotty was a dog who embraced cosplay and all things dress-up.
It begins with a text.
I think I am having a small existential crisis.
Despite the fact that it is balmy outside and I am lucky enough to be in a Mexican resort with my daughter Emily smelling beach smells and chlorine from the pools below our balcony, my whole entire body shivers and I almost drop the phone onto the hard tile of the tiny rectangle of our balcony. It’s the sort of text that makes alarms go off in a wife’s head.
“Crap.” I stare at the phone. “Crap. Crap. Crap.”
“What is it?” Emily, my daughter, asks.
“Nothing.”
Biting my lip, I look away off the balcony into the sunset, which seems appropriately melodramatic for my feelings right now. Mexican sunsets over the Pacific Ocean are dramatic, full of oranges and purples and stunning colors as the sun vanishes too quickly below the horizon.
“You,” Emily says, “are a lying liar who lies.”
Sometimes.
Emily, who is 22, is about to enter boot camp in the United States Army. This is already giving me my own existential crisis because how am I supposed to take care of her if she is in the Army? I couldn’t even call her if she was in boot camp. She couldn’t call me!
I’m not supposed to refer to it as boot camp. It’s actually called Basic Training, but I fail at this over and over again. I sort of fail at everything.
1. Mothering - I am way too attached to my kid. Notice, I wrote ‘kid,’ not young adult.
2. Work - I am a children’s book writer who is not J.K. Rowling.
3. Life - I worry too much, volunteer too much, think too much.
4. Relationship - See above.
5. Words - I call Basic Training, Boot Camp. I forget the words to things all the time. And my profession is writer. This can’t be good.
6. Health - Every time I have to run more than 10 minutes, I have a panic attack.
7. Attitude - See the entire above list.
All these negatives are compounded by the fact that I just turned forty six and my dog Scotty is dying from a tumor around his heart, which is making me feel incredibly guilty about going on one last vacation with Emily, which was planned before we knew he was dying. The veterinarian said it could be a month or it could be a year. But the moment we left, it started to look like a month.
Scotty liked Mr. Penguin. A lot.
And my husband Shaun’s next text sort of makes my heart weep.
I wouldn’t be telling you this if you girls weren’t gone for three more days, but Scotty is steadily going downhill. He ate very little chicken yesterday and refused chicken today. I bought him shaved steak at the store and cooked it for him. He ate one little bit from my hand.
I text, Oh no.
He is alert and goes outside and went on a walk with us but he is very skinny and tired. I think it is getting harder to walk and that is probably due to weakness and loss of muscle. He is drinking water regularly be he just won’t eat. I will try later because he might just be exhausted from our walk. The next text says this. I read it five times.
Did you try peanut butter? Just straight? Sometimes you have to jump start him. I ask.
I will try that now.
I try to imagine all of this happening. Scotty sweetly refusing to eat. Shaun trying not to be frustrated or too obviously upset. This is very sad. I am sure it is hard for you. If you get Chinese, you have to get him crab ragoons.
I am obviously a font of helpful information and that uselessness really gets to me.
Scotty hanging out
That night, I have a bunch of dreams. Most of them involve me being powerless. I watch as children in a low flying hot air balloon are struck by a tractor trailer truck taking a corner in New York City. I watch through the window of my brownstone, helpless, although I have to say that I like that my subconscious gave me such a nice house. Running outside, I don my old Bar Harbor Fire Department gear. It’s shabby and mismatched. I stand there as they barricade the street, extricate the kids from the tree, the basket. A leg is dangling from a tree. It’s not attached to anything. Another firefighter, a real firefighter, looks at me and says, “I’m glad you’re here to help, but you have too much kindness in your eyes to be in emergency services.”
The next dream I’m in a forest that’s been set on fire by drug lords. Shaun is leading us out and I’m all like, “How did we not see that coming?” He goes, “It came from an angle that we didn’t expect.”
And I guess that’s the thing that my subconscious is trying to get through to my conscious right then - on the eve of my dog dying, my daughter heading to boot camp - I can’t control anything really. Cancer happens to dogs. Life happens to kids. And it is all beyond my control as much as I don’t want it to be beyond my control.
My final dream is with my mother, who like most of my family, is dead. We’re standing on a beautiful lawn that’s sloping down to the sea. There are other ladies walking around in twosomes and threesomes. They are all sort of wealthy looking, wearing linen, just strolling like some scene out of a Victorian novel, maybe Jane Austen? There are clusters of lilacs in bloom, daffodils and tulips and other larger bushes that haven’t flowered yet.
“Isn’t lovely?” she asks. “It is,” I say, but I think the serenity of it seems sort of boring. “I stay just five minutes from here.”
She is so happy about this. And then I realize she is dead and this is some sort of death place and I am not meant to be here.
When I text Shaun all my dreams he texts back, Damn, baby! You need to be sleeping at home, with me!!
I agree.
The Emster's senior picture.
The next day Emily is on the balcony, a small four-feet-deep, 12-feet-long tiled enclosure with a half glass railing that overlooks the resort. The world smells fresh and flowery, like oceans and big-leafed plants. The sun is setting over the bay, which in Puerto Vallarta means the sky is shot with orange and pinks. The ocean has turned a lovely bright blue. The sun sets fast. A blink and you miss it.
“Why does everything have to end?” she asks.
“So it can start again.” I feel a little Buddhist saying it, like I should be doing yoga or something. “Listen, you are about to embark on huge things, great things. Your whole life is restarting right now. And it’s scary because it’s the unknown, but you so have this. This is great. This is the beginning of the next phase of your adventure.”
And the thing is, I believe it. I really believe it. I feel like I’ve just scored major good mom points. Not like there is an actual scoreboard or anything.
Emily doesn’t even turn her head to look at me. “That would be more believable if they weren’t playing old 80s music. It’s hard to be inspired.”
“’Pretty Woman’ isn’t doing it for you?”
“Not really.” She sighs. She always gets sort of dramatic on balconies. “I just want to go out and explore you know? Like those mountains. I want to explore them.”
“Well, you are… It’s your life and that’s what you’re exploring. There will be tons of mountains in them, metaphorical and real.”
“Sigh, Mommy. Just sigh.”
The music turns into Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” and the singer in the band can’t hit the high notes. We find this hysterical. And just like that the mood turns from maudlin to goofy, which is pretty much how all of life works.
This is what I try to tell myself months later, waiting for a book to come out, waiting to see if a book I've submitted to a publisher will be picked up. Life changes. It twists and turns and nothing is super permanent, not even my mood. And as much as I want people to buy my book and like it, there's no real knowing that they will, no sure thing, no absolutes that I'll even be a writer this time next year. I never would have imagined two years ago that my daughter would be in the Army or predicted that sweet Scotty would die. I never would have imagined the wild fires in Northern California or the hurricane that has devastated Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or the political landscape that is happening right now, today.
Emily has gone through basic training and officer candidate school and is waiting to start field artillery officer training. Scotty has died. And me? I'm still having my existential questions, wondering if this is what I'm meant to do and who I'm meant to be and how long I'll be able to do it in a world that needs so much help, in a world where people look for answers and survival in the face of storms man-made and natural.
I'm going to share more of this weird year and my journey on my blog because I don't honestly know how not to be authentic. It's a character flaw. And also because it makes me feel better, I think? A little bit. I hope you'll bear with me.
This is the book that comes out Oct. 17, which is Tuesday. It is quirky and funny, I think.